All About English

08/11/2024

If anyone tells you punctuation doesn't matter, show them this: "Come eat children" and "Come eat, children"!

29/05/2024

The reason is quite simple: "Fridge" is an abbreviated form of the brand name "Frigidaire" (frigid air?) and dates from the 1920s, whereas "refrigerator" comes from the Latin verb "refrigerare" from "frigus" (cold) and dates from the early 17th cent. So the two words are not actually related at all, despite appearances.

16/07/2023

Every now and then one comes across something different. Today this cropped up on a US hobby shop's website. You'd be excused for laughing and saying, "What??". I did, too. It transpires that this term is nothing but American legalese for "day", i.e. the period between either sunrise and sunset or midnight to midnight. Most businesses I have been having, or had, dealings with tend to give processing and/or shipping times in business days (Monday to Friday, in most cases), but using "natural days" would indicate that the business in question operates seven days a week.

Sometimes the legal profession defies logic and common sense and gives us absurdities like "natural days"...

04/07/2023

CANNON vs CANON

12/02/2023

Minna Sundberg remapped the usual tree diagram used by historical linguists to show how languages and language families are related into this one lovely tree. (Thank you on Facebook for bringing this to our attention.)

01/02/2023

WHERE ARE YOU FROM?

24/01/2023

ONES

21/01/2023

A very intelligent and reasoned approach to a vexed question. I highly recommend Gideon's channel!

What are the origins of the English language? In this video we look at lots of facts and statistics and try to reach some accurate figures about English word...

14/01/2023

There are, of course, plenty more, like "Drakensberg mountain" ("berg" is the Afrikaans for "mountain") or, slightly less obvious for anyone who doesn't know German, "Schloß Hohensalzburg", where "Schloß" and "Burg" both mean "castle".

19 Totally Redundant and Tautological Place Names. A tautology is an expression or phrase that says the same thing twice, just in a different way. Differently said, it is an expression that has two or more parts that are redundant, or synonymous. Most often, a tautology is considered undesirable an...

08/01/2023

BREECH vs BREACH

21/12/2022

PREMIÈRE vs PREMIER.

11/11/2022

AW vs AWE